Children (kodomo)

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Child, Children (kodomo)

***** Location: Japan, worldwide
***** Season: Non-seasonal Topic
***** Category: Humanity

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Explanation

The Children of the World !

There are many ways to call the, all will be included in this topic, from baby to teenager ...



source :　www.jiu.ac.jp/museum

菊川英山 - すな鳥子供遊
Kikugawa Eizan Children playing along the river



Universal Children's Day on November 20
Children's Day is celebrated on various days in many places around the world, to honor children globally. It was established in 1954 to protect children working long hours in dangerous circumstances and allow all children access to an education. The UN General Assembly recommended that all countries should establish a Universal Children's Day on an "appropriate" day.
Major global variants include a Universal Children's Day on November 20, by United Nations recommendation.
©　More in the WIKIPEDIA !

. Kigo Calendar - November .


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child, ko 子
children, kodomo　子供、子供たち
baby, akachan, midorigo　赤ちゃん　嬰児

my child, wagako　我が子
..... ako　吾子, ago あご

grandchild, grandchildren, mago　孫

orphan 孤児　minashigo / koji

koboozu　小坊主 young boy, young monk


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"The Life of Japanese Children"
Yurimoto Keiko

- Shared by Yoshio Kusaba -



Haiku written by Children, further LINKS !!!!! .


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abandoned child 捨て子, 捨子 (sutego)
topic for haiku


猿を聞人捨子に秋の風いかに
saru o kiku hito sutego ni aki no kaze ika ni

Matsuo Basho, "Journal of Bleached Bones in a Field"

those who have heard a monkey's cry:
how about this abandoned child
in the autumn wind?
(Tr. Makoto Ueda)


a monkey shriek—
for this abandoned child,
what is the autumn wind like?

or

You who hear the monkey’s cries:
what of an abandoned child
in the autumn wind?
Reference : translations of this haiku


those who listen for the monkeys:
what of this child
in the autumn wind?
Tr. Barnhill
with further discussion of "mono no aware" .


some anonymous senryu from the Edo period

今捨てる子に　ありたけの乳をのませ

捨てにゆく子に笑われて　泣き出し

拾わるる親は　闇から　手を合わせ　

泣くよりもあわれ　捨て子の笑い顔　

拍子木で　捨て子の股をあけてみる

捨てる子は　親父の年に　四十下

source : 興津　要：探訪　江戸川柳



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Worldwide use

Germany

Kind, Kinder, Baby, Teenager, Enkel, Enkelkind

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Things found on the way


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HAIKU

子に飽くと申す人には花もなし
ko ni aku to moosu hito ni wa hana mo nashi

For one who says,
"I am tired of children,"
there are no blossoms.

When love is absent, cherry blossoms go unappreciated ...

Robert Aitken ... more
source : books.google.co.jp


MORE
. Matsuo Basho - Family Ties .
His Wife ? Jutei-Ni 寿貞尼
His Son ? Jirobei 二郎兵衛
His nephew Tooin 桃印　Toin

The above hokku is (most probably) for the three children of his wife.


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. WKD : Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶 .


あこが餅あこが餅とて並べけり
ako ga mochi ako ga mochi tote narabe keri

my child's rice cakes
my child's rice cakes...
all in a row

R. H. Blyth pictures the scene: A mother is making rice cakes while her child watches impatiently. To "calm his over-anxious feelings," she says, "This one is yours; this one is yours too," and so on;
A History of Haiku (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1964) 1.373. The row of tasty cakes embodies her love.
Tr. David Lanoue


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小道者や手を引れつつ赤扇
ko dôsha ya te wo hitaretsutsu aka ôgi

the little pilgrim
being led by hand...
red paper fan

Visiting a Buddhist temple or Shinto shrine accompanied by a parent, the child holds a red paper fan.
Issa liked the image enough to revisit it two months later:

ko dôsha no toshi wa ikutsu zo aka ôgi

how old
is this little pilgrim?
red paper fan
Tr. David Lanoue

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. WKD : Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶 .


孤が手本にするや反故うちは
minashigo ga tehon ni suru ya hogu uchiwa

the orphan's
calligraphy practice book --
a wastepaper fan

Tr. and Comment from Chris Drake:

This hokku is from the 5th month (June) in 1823. Judging by its placement in Issa's diary, it's from the latter half of the month. In any case, it was written right around the time of the death of Issa's wife on 5/12. If the hokku was written after her death, Issa, as a widower, may be identifying with the orphan to a certain extent. The orphan here seems to be poor and has no formal book with examples in it to use for practicing basic calligraphy -- the kana syllabary symbols and maybe a few simple ideographs or characters. Instead, the child has to make do with copying the calligraphy brushed on an old letter or other document that has been used as part of a round, non-folding fan.

In the country many people made their own fans using recycled, previously-used paper pasted onto a round bamboo frame with a handle on it, and the old paper on the fan the orphan uses has some kind of calligraphy on it, which s/he carefully copies again and again with brush, ink, and more old paper. It's not clear who's educating and taking care of the orphan, though it may well be a relative.


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陽炎や 目につきまとふ 笑い顔
kagero ya me ni tsukimatou warai-gao

shimmering air?
his smiling face
always there

This hokku was written on 1/17 (Feb. 19), 1821. It appears in a haibun piece called "Grieving for Ishitaro," Ishitarou o itamu, about the death on 1/11 of his third child, a son, who had been born just over three months earlier on 10/5 in 1820. This was the third straight child who had died, and this time it was not sickness but an accident. Issa's wife had strapped the infant to her back under her outer robe while she worked -- the most common method of carrying infants -- and somehow the child became asphyxiated. Issa went almost crazy with grief, and his haibun blames his overworked wife unfairly for the infant's death, though he calms down at the end, where he places three hokku and then two waka, the last of which declares he sees his dead son even in his dreams.

The hokku above is the third and last hokku in the haibun, and the headnote to it says it was written when he prayed at his son's grave on 1/17, the seventh day after the son's death. In Japanese Buddhism, special requiem prayers for a newly dead soul are said on the 7th, 14th, 21st, 28th, 35th, 42nd, and 49th days. The first is very important, as is the last, when the prayers are believed to send the soul off toward the Pure Land, far beyond its attachments to its former existence. So on the "first seventh" Issa and his wife must have gone to the family temple for the requiem, after which they probably prayed their own prayers in front of the grave. I think the ya in the first line is more than simply a cutting word. It seems to retain its earlier sense of being a question mark as well. The shimmering Issa sees in the air resembles heat haze, yet it doesn't go away, no matter where he looks. Could the visions simply be heat haze? The question surely answers itself. His prayers at his son's grave likely include a prayer for his son's soul to soon be smiling in the Pure Land.

Chris Drake


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かたみ子や母が来るとて手をたたく
katami-ko ya haha ga kuru tote te o tataku

motherless child
clapping for joy --
"mother's coming"

The headnote says this hokku was written at the time of the Bon Festival, or Returning Souls Festival, so it must refer to the 7th month (7/14-16) in 1823, the year in which Issa's wife had died on 5/12. This Bon Festival was the first time she returned as a soul to see her family during the festival, and Issa apparently told (tote) his young third son Konzaburo that his mother was coming to see them (Maruyama Kazuhiko, Kobayashi Issa, Oufuusha, 1977: 208). If it was not written then, it must have been written later as a reference to the time of the Returning Souls Festival of 1823. In any case, in the hokku Issa feels that his son, only a year and four months old, has understood his words about his mother returning, since the boy claps his hands for joy.

Issa mentions this first Returning Souls Festival in a haibun piece called "Grieving for Konzaburo," Konzaburou o itamu, written in the 5th and 7th months in 1823, and in it he mentions that at the time of the festival he traveled to meet his son, who was being cared for by a wet nurse. Around the time of his wife's death, the boy became malnourished, so Issa put him in the care of a wet nurse in another village. When Issa saw his son in the 7th month, the child was only a little better, but the boy nevertheless smiled a big smile when he saw his father. The hokku about the boy clapping presumably refers to this meeting. However, in Issa's haibun he places a different hokku at the end of this scene:

kado no chou ko ga haeba tobi haeba tobu

butterfly by the door --
the child crawls, and it flies
crawls and it flies

The hokku seems to include a prayer by Issa for his son to get well and move as freely as the butterfly that the crawling boy seems to love and want to go near. Issa's prayers were in vain, however, and Konzaburo died on 12/21 of that year, leaving Issa without his wife and with no children.

Issa remarried in 1824 but was soon divorced. Then, in the 9th month (October) of 1825, still single, he wrote an apparent revision of the earlier hokku about the child clapping and the hokku about his crawling son and the butterfly:

itoshi-go ya haha ga kuru tote haiwarau

deeply loved child
smiles as he crawls --
"mother's coming"

Issa seems to weave both of the earlier hokku together into a single hokku in which he remembers his deep love for the boy and his son's smile two years before in 1823, which seemed to show that he knew how much Issa loved him. He remembers the boy's smile as he crawled after the butterfly as an expression of joy, as was the boy's wish to fly like a butterfly. This third hokku is written two months after the Returning Souls Festival, but it is also written after the deaths of both mother and child, so in the first line Issa may also mean "deeply loved by your mother" and may therefore be imagining the souls of his wife and son meeting in the Pure Land and at last finding peace and even bliss.

Chris Drake


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小坊主や袂の中の蝉の声
koboozu ya tamoto no naka no semi no koe

a young boy
with cicadas singing
in his sleeves

This hokku is from the 6th month (July) of 1815, when Issa was living back in his hometown. Issa uses an affectionate phrase for a young boy, "little monk," to show he's impressed. In Issa's time parents commonly cut the hair of their boys rather short or even shaved part of their heads until they were six or seven, so "little monk" (ko-bouzu) and "little Buddhist priest" (ko-zou) were extremely common terms for little boys, although the former was generally a term of endearment or admiration and the latter tended to be used more for scolding or ordering boys around. I checked all Issa's hokku with "little monk" in them and could find only one in which the context clearly implies a young boy training to be a monk in a Buddhist temple.
In contrast, in many hokku, such as the one below from the 7th month (August) of 1818, "little monk" clearly seems to refer to an ordinary young boy:

kobouzu ga ko ni oshiekeri amanogawa

a young boy
tells the baby about
the Milky Way

The boy seems to be explaining to the baby (probably his sister or brother) in very simple language the legend behind the Tanabata Star Festival held on 7/7, in which the Weaver Woman star crosses the Milky Way to visit the Oxherd Star. Perhaps he points to the sky as he explains.

In the first hokku above, Issa sees a young boy, perhaps one of a group, who has caught several cicadas with his net or perhaps with his quick hands. He doesn't seem to have a bamboo cage. Instead, he just puts the cicadas in the deep parts of his sleeves that hang down below his elbows, baggy areas he uses as pouches. The cries of the cicadas are quite strong, so though he's small he's probably a powerful presence as he walks along. Perhaps he even gives the impression of having vestigial wings.

Chris Drake


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A temple koboozu 小坊主 sleeping on the big gong, with mice hopping around.


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Spielende Kinder
auf den Eisenbahnschienen...
Grashalme zittern

psychronicon
http://www.gedichte.com/showthread.php?t=64242

children playing
on the railway tracks ...
grass is trembling
(Tr. Gabi Greve)

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Hiroshima o shirazaru ko-ra yo ryuutoo-e

children --
floating lit paper lanterns
not knowing Hiroshima

Yasuhiko Shigemoto (Japan - Hiroshima)
Hiroshima Memorial Day, August 6, 1945

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speech impaired kid
watching chirpy birds
laughing loudly

- Shared by Aurora Geet -
Joys of Japan, 2012

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"Ako...ako!"
screams the spider
as the size 9 descends


Ako is an old word for waga ko, "my child";
I guess the spiders would have used the old words whilst we humans went onto newer words.

- Shared by Donall Dempsey -
Joys of Japan, 2012


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bickering children
the weatherman predicts
the first storm of May

- Shared by Laura Becker Sherman -
WKD facebook, 2012



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my grandson
teaches me to smile
September sun

- Shared by Ella Wagemakers -
Joys of Japan, September 2012




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Utagawa Kuniyoshi - Kodakara Asobi 歌川国芳「子宝遊」

source : Kuniyoshi, Kodakara Asobi


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Related words

***** . kodomo no hi 子供の日 day of the children .
May 5

. nakizumoo 泣角力 crying baby sumo .
September 19



***** Mother (o-fukuro) Japan

***** Mother's Day, Father's Day


***** Chigo (temple acolytes) Japan. Temple Children


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